An Eulerian-based immersed boundary method for particle suspensions with implicit lubrication model

TL;DR

This paper introduces an improved Eulerian immersed boundary method that implicitly models lubrication forces and accurately simulates dense particle suspensions and turbulent flows, enhancing computational efficiency and physical realism.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel immersed boundary method with implicit lubrication modeling capable of simulating dense suspensions and turbulent flows without additional correction forces.

Findings

Successfully reproduces suspension rheology up to 46% volume fraction.

Accurately predicts turbulent duct flow with non-uniform shear.

No explicit lubrication force computation needed.

Abstract

We describe an immersed boundary method in which the fluid-structure coupling is achieved in an Eulerian framework. The method is an improved extension of the immersed boundary method originally developed by Kajishima et al. [1], which accounts for the inertia of the fictitious fluid inside the particle volume and is thus able to reproduce the behaviour of particles both in the case of neutrally-buoyant objects and in the presence of density difference between the particles and the fluid. The method is capable to handle the presence of multiple suspended objects, i.e., a suspension, by including a soft-sphere normal collision model, while the lubrication correction typically added to similar immersed boundary methods in order to capture the sub-grid unresolved lubrication force is here treated implicitly, i.e., naturally obtained without any explicit expression, thus no additional computation is required. We show that our methodology can successfully reproduce the rheology of a particle suspension in a shear flow up to a dense regime (with a maximum particle volume fraction around 46%) without any additional correction force. The applicability of this methodology is also tested in a turbulent pressure-driven duct flow at high Reynolds number in the presence of non-negligible inertia and non-uniform shear-rate, showing good agreement with experimental measurements.